Adventures in Athens: The Way to Anyone's Heart: Their Stomach

I don’t think food in the U.S. will ever taste as good again. Everything in Greece just tastes better! My favorite thing so far has to be the Market. The Market is right near our dorm building but it only occurs on Mondays from 8-3ish so we have to stock up for the week .Last week I stocked up on fruit: cherries, bananas, apples, white peaches, kiwi, oranges, peaches and apricots. I spent maybe like 10 euro total. The produce here is more colorful, tastier and juicer. If I wasn't already in love with the culture, I'm in love with the fruit. Is that a thing? Oh well, I'm sure daddy would rather me fall in love with the fruit than a boy!

Each Monday we have a potluck with our whole group and last week I think we set the bar pretty high for ourselves. I made dessert (of course) of sliced peaches, topped with butter, sugar and cinnamon. And volia! A healthy dessert (kinda).

The girls in our dorm room are also spoiling each other. Morgan, one of my suitemates is really gifted at finding amazing Pinterest recipes and we actually make them. One night we decided to make homemade chicken souvlaki pizza and it might have been the best thing ever. We all pitched in to help, from cleaning and cutting the vegetables, marinating the chicken and creating our own tzatziki sauce. The end product was worth the wait. And we devoured it in about 10 seconds. And for dessert we made Cinnamon Dumpling cookies.

We are definitely making this pizza again!

One morning we decided to make Nutella French toast and this is definitely something I will have to make back in the states. What better way to start your day than with Nutella? And we made fresh-squeezed orange juice from the oranges from the market.

Our favorite thing as a group is finding the best gyro spot, which we lovingly nickname Taco Bell. Don’t get me wrong, I actually hate Taco Bell but the very first place we nicknamed Taco Bell was because they were fast, cheap, and open super late. Except the gyros are wayyy better than tacos. I never had a gyro until I got to Greece but it is definitely something I will have withdrawals from when I get back to the States.

My very first gyro in Santorini

Fun fact: Greek salads in Greece are nothing like Greek salads in the States. It actually has no lettuce in it. The salad is comprised of tomatoes, onion, green pepper, cucumber, olives and a block of feta cheese on top. It's actually much better than what I originally thought was a Greek salad.

I finally know how to order properly in Greek. We had our first outside lesson in our Survival Greek class at a coffee shop with our whole class, a few Greek students and our Greek professor, along with Dr. Kaplan. It was a very different experience from when I observed an American coffee shop. In Greece, people use coffee as a reason to hang out and catch up. When we asked Sophia (our Greek professor) what the average amount of time would be a coffee date on average she said anything less than 2 hours is short. I was like um, what? If I can even fit coffee dates into my schedule they are like 30ish minutes long on a good day. It blows my mind that Greeks will spend that much time at a coffee shop. But then again, it really isn’t about the coffee, it’s about the company you are with which shows that Greeks value relationships much more than we do as Americans. I'm already looking forward to hopefully having some more coffee dates with the Greek students because having their perspective on Greek life is very interesting and helpful.